The Obsessive Diary

I put my glasses in the washing machine and left my AirPod case on the desk and went out for breakfast listening to the last chapter of Permission by Elissa Altman as I walked the few minutes to Electric House. Only the third thing was meant. I suppose as usual I am tired and also being forgetful or maybe just overwrought with the silence that has descended my world since last October. Without that everyday conversation with another there is peace and there is loneliness and there is a writer’s paradise in the hours I work and a human hell in remembering the times when I would have chewed the fat and passed the time with someone I trusted to be there. He is not there. I shouldn’t have trusted him. Yes, having experienced the rage quietening and life getting on with itself it has risen up again as it’s likely to do when his name comes up, when I am reminded. I am still angry. M and I talked about the responsibility of boundaries, one’s own lying with oneself and no one else, and I thought about what makes me let him into hurt me and realised it comes from want. I want an apology. I want him to stand accountable. I may never get it.

Yoga this morning, early, having got up to write. By mistake and inadvertently I’ve begun the 7th draft of the novel I’m working on; by mistake and inadvertently because I meant to start in August after a holiday but then I started looking at notes, and then I opened the document, and then. So an hour this morning rewriting what I see now was a wrong turn in tone and character, and a walk to the Life Centre (forgetting my mat) and an hour sweating and slipping on one of their mats in a room packed to the jowls with women like me except with dyed hair and some younger and one man; there’s always one man. He tends to put his mat in the middle. This guy was intimate in his detail of debugging from whoever had used his yoga mat before him. Spray, wipe, spray until he’d made it clear the world was disgusting and infection was not his thing. In Savasana I cried.

Over breakfast, Permission finished - and I have so much to say about this I don’t know where to start but luckily she and I will be in conversation on Wednesday, so I guess I’ll start there - I read Quartet in Autumn, the most exquisite tragic-comedy I’ve ever read. So little happens. So much is said. Pym is unparalleled. At the table beside me a young couple touched hands, their fingers interlacing, his stretching further than hers across the space between them. So often lately when I see this I think, you wait (to the girl) one day the curl of his hair will be the thing you despise, his nose will enrage you, you will wonder how you ever found his laugh appealing. It happens to me all the time; on the escalator descending into the tube, passing a couple snogging, his thin sandy hair already receding, her hands upon it, You wait. The girl staring up adoringly at the big baby of a man who thinks elasticated waists are acceptable and which she thinks are sweet, You wait. Perhaps I will fall in love again. Perhaps I will find again the generosity of heart to not want to burst their bubble. This is what being alone does to a person. The internal monologue is rarely tested. We become unreasonable. Barbara Pym knew it. It is this she sets out exquisitely. I see myself in those pages and think, come on now. Soften. Be nice.

On Friday I met with my friends as usual at our place on Portobello and J showed us the photograph of the Peruvian women who gathered in a circle in the sea, naked, to scream and kick in visceral response to a spike in femicides. This, I want to do. This encapsulates my rage. A silence has descended on my world and I want to know, where do I put it? Where can I speak it, this fuel that is anger that is words that desire to be action? It is cellular. It is in my bones. I put it here.

Eleanor

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How can I not begin this post with a snap of Augusta Sagnelli , Creative Director & Co Founder of Souvenir Magazine , caught in a Paris café with the latest edition? Impossible. Red shoes, red fan, red binds on the red chequered chair, the deep burn red of her bag, her drink - is it iced tea? moving into shades of earth. It all begs the question, have you read yours yet?

This second edition of Souvenir, the new anglophone literary & art publication bringing you fiction, essay, critique, art, interview, and reportage three times a year direct from Paris is yours by becoming a tier or founding member. Do it. Support the arts. I’ll see you in those pages.

Yes, I’m in this month’s edition, and yes, so are a multitude of others who’ve been lucky enough to work with the great creative and editorial team to produce an imprint of the highest quality in feel, look and content. Augusta Sagnelli , Samuél Lopez-Barrantes and Kyle Berlin are up to something very cool indeed. Join the party. Get on board. This is the creative wave we’ve been looking for. I’ll be reporting LIVE from Paris later this month to give you a behind the scenes look at working with this exacting, high-standards team. They know what matters and they are unflinching in achieving it. Praise be. They speak my language.

Paris has continued to play a part in my week as locked into the titanic battles at Roland Garros I’ve watched titans fall, first Sinner, then Djokovic. Last night I settled in to watch Fonseca face Ruud and promptly fell asleep. Remind me to let TNT know not to book me for evening commentary. I woke this morning to the news that he’d won - Fonseca - what a story is unfolding there. Next up, the battle of the 19yr olds, Fonseca vs Jódar. I am obsessed with tennis. Wait till Wimbledon opens. I’m going to become unbearable.

And heads up, this week I’ll be LIVE in conversation with Eve Chase - join us on Wednesday when we’ll be discussing her latest novel, The Secret Thread, out this week. She’s clocked up over a million in sales over the last few years, been a Sunday Times Bestseller and a Richard & Judy Bookclub favourite. We’ll unpick the hard work, dedication and craftsmanship to understand how it’s done.

Outside my window the woodpecker who’s taken over the fat ball feeder pecks heavily while blue tits flutter nearby. As the moon rose to full last night, the temperatures dipped and we long for rain. I’ve had four grateful days at home recovering from what feels like months and months of adrenaline. I wake, wander about, lie down for a minute and find myself dropped into heavy sleeps that last hours, that leave me foggy. But my suitcase is packed again and despite Kenny resolutely sitting on it I am away today for another bout of full diary work and play.

I shall report.

Eleanor

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Ocean Vuong last night at The Emmanuel Centre in London with Andrew Wille and K and others - Andrew gave me the tip off and gathered us, he has seen him many times before but this was my first, akin to seeing Nick Cave, knowing from the moment he began that we were in the presence of greatness. An eloquence and an accuracy of thought and word. A deep and broad learning. He spoke for an hour almost without pause, Jack Edwards guiding with questions when needed but they weren’t really needed at all. I wondered if back stage OV knew what he was going to speak about, how he prepares and arrived at the thought that his life is preparation for these present moments, that he involves himself in what fascinates him and when the time comes to speak he just opens his mouth. It had none of the feel of practiced book publicity interview, the same stories, the same questions, a sense that at any given event on the tour the output would be roughly the same. No. It had the feel, like seeing Nick Cave, that this moment was unique, that these thoughts he expressed in that moment were of that moment however much he might have considered them before. He was present. His homework - that of living and studying and being involved in what fascinated him irrespective of outcome or who was watching - was evident. And though it isn’t by the by at all, Jack Edwards was fabulous too.

Took a cab back to west London, the heat still making everyone’s footsteps slow, and found myself in the pimped up seats of London’s singing cabbie - the full red leather, Union Jack, cushions and champagne bucket rich interior of the man who pissed off Tom Jones on The Voice. He told me the story in a tone so muted I had to lean forward in my seat, but the gist was this: he got to the televised last few rounds. He sang but they didn’t choose him. Swinging around in his chair, Tom Jones was deep in explanation, you’re great, but what would I do with you? when our singing cabbie felt the rush of just wishing to get off stage and interrupted our national treasure by tapping his watch and asking him to get on with it, I’ve got a fare to meet - as a joke, he said, but King Jones did no find it funny. A limp handshake followed, a leaning forward to whisper in his ear, You shouldn’t have done that, son, and the piece was never aired. It was ended. I asked him how he felt about it now.

Dinner at my favourite local, they are getting to know me, this single woman who eats alone, who doesn’t read or look at her phone but just watches. It is ripe with conversations, scenes to store in my mind. Last night’s gem, a woman and a man, my age or perhaps a little older, she very beautiful with dark pepper hair scraped back, tanned and sculpted profile by an artist who knows about graceful age. He, larger in his seat than her, white grey shock above thick black rimmed glasses of the kind favoured by architects, or as it turned out energy workers who think it’s their god given right to describe other people’s energy fields as rare, which he did when her son turned up and kissed her repeatedly smack on the lips. You’re exactly as I imagined you, this the man to the son, and so it was apparent that although he’d know the woman for a many years, he’d never met her child.

He told them about Egypt, the retreats he runs, the coming of the End Times and yes, I even heard Atlantis thrown in there while she interjected with the occasional wow, flattered in that way I’ve seen myself behave around this kind of b******t. Christ did he go on, so pleased with his own voice, his own opinion, his own thoughts. So the opposite of Ocean Vuong.

Eleanor

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When I got back to the farm last night there appeared to be a large triangular black figure with two points of burning flame on its head in the stone circle, and someone running from stone to stone. It was late. It had been a long day. I thought, do I go up and see what’s what? And then I thought, no, to hell with it. Leave them. I’ve been the keeper of these stones for almost thirty years. You name it, I’ve seen it dancing among them. There comes a moment when the strength and power of themselves has to be enough. Whoever those witchy Wiccan druid warlock sunset whirling summer pagans were, I hope they had fun. It could easily have been a trick of the light. It might well have been kids hanging their jacket on the central stone, torches precariously balanced, playing hide and seek.

I will never know because I turned for the house instead, dragging my bag that I’d already dragged from London to Oxford to Guildford, feeling for the key in The Secret Place, opening my laptop as soon as the cats were fed, locking in to GMP vs Djokovic at Roland Garros, hoping I hadn’t missed a titanic unseating having been watching it on my phone all the way from Reading via dodgy wifi, fist pumping in a carriage sweaty with packed to the jowls Sunday; tennis makes me forget my whereabouts. I become that person lost in AirPods and my own enormous world filled with the sound of thwacking ball and grunts, the tension as tight as the strings. GMP is a Frenchman and Djokovic wasn’t happy but he beat him anyway, a deflating in the 2nd set like a child who’s used up all their beans in the 1st, a hot headed youth who came roaring onto court but left with his racket hanging by his side and I crawled off to bed liking Novak even less than I had before, Kenny practically sitting on my head, so determined she was to recognise I was home.

That was Sunday, Oxford because I’d got tickets to see Gentle, Angry Women - the film by Barbara Santi about three young activists who trace the legacy of Greenham forty years on. A kooky little indie picture house, cool after the heat outside, Greenham banners tied badly which kept undoing themselves and slithering to the ground. Peggy Seeger was there looking stylish in pink. To the man handing out CND newsletters she said, I answer to ma’am or babe.” I liked that. I gave her a copy of Fallout. She was beautiful.

But how am I, that’s what you want to know, isn’t it? Okay, I’ll tell you. I was frustrated by the sense that I’ve written this book and they’ve made this film and I’ve been trying to link up and none of that crew seem to be interested. Which is typical of me because when I’m excited about something I can’t understand why the whole world isn’t excited about it too. And like GMP, I feel deflated in the 2nd set of the game of selling books having used up a lot of my beans in the 1st. It’s a deadly mindset to fall into, that I have an opponent across the net who is trying to defeat me. Framing the difficulty of getting public traction as a personal assault on my wants smells, as D would say, like home cooking. Power over a thing precious to me in the hands of untrustworthy others is my childhood all over again. I’ve been dogged by the familiar sensations of being obstructed, blocked, actively banned from my desires; oh look, power handed over. I am small and my life depends on people who don’t give a s**t about me. Who are unreliable. Who hold what is most precious to me and dangle it over a five story drop. Oh yes.

When I was a child, after the man in the basement had left, his insane wife who was our nanny dragged me out from behind my bedroom door where I’d been hiding, pushed me over the sill of the open window and hung me over that five story drop, legs dangling to the spiked iron railing far below. Those of you who’ve read my memoir know this scene, and what happened after, but a new little piece came to light recently in an email from a family member who remembered travelling to France that summer with my mum, the Citroën rushing along back roads heading south, my mother’s hands on the wheel. I don’t know why she keeps going on about it. These the words that were recalled, my mother saying them repeatedly. I don’t know why she keeps going on about it; she being me. I must have been in that car, somewhere at the back, probably lying on the suitcases. I wonder if I’d shut up about it by then.

It was this scene in our class on Voice this month that came back to me. The rushing of the road. The rushing of the wind through that open window. My mother’s hands a perfect fit on the wheel. The nanny’s hands a perfect fit on my waist. The scene a perfect fit over my present day. I am angry. I come roaring onto court. I am not gentle at all and yet, and yet; this is the work, the reframing. I have spent the week pulling that girl in from the window, telling her the threat is over. I am gentle with her. There is no demon. There comes a moment when the strength and power of myself has to be enough.

Eleanor

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Thank you Emily Charlotte Powell, Pia Hinckle, Lisa GK, Roz Edwards, and many others for tuning into my live video with Bridget Young! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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Hitchhiking barefoot in Sri Lanka. That was the news this week by phone accompanied by photos of those bare feet but as P pointed out when we met for lunch at the Ashmolean, didn’t we hitch around Zim? And yes we did, aged 19, too and girls and completely unguarded in our notion of danger and fear. At a lovely event for Fallout hosted by Phoebe Griffith I found myself in the company of brilliant women discussing their fears for their children and themselves - at least in the eighties we knew what to be afraid of, the threat was a bomb we could see - and I thought of my son out in the wilds, tasting life and felt the certainty that whatever dangers he brushed with, this facing life was preparation at its best.

And meanwhile in London B is out in their wilds; I texted them last Friday, knowing their engagement with all things activism, heads up this weekend darling, it’s a perfect storm of London Riot - a march for Palestine, a march for the far right and as if that wasn’t enough, the FA cup final would be bringing thousands to the city at the same time. They sent me a thumbs up and I had to be content with that, so on meeting for dinner this week I said, did you go? It turned out they had, unintentionally, while on their way to a comedy club. They said, it was so funny, mum, all these extremist nationalists with their England flags and all the pro Palestine with their Palestinian flags walking side by side towards the starting point of their marches, not talking, not looking at each other, not starting their protesting until they were gathered in their groups. I see it, lining up for the fight like boxers in the ring, waiting for the bell. Hurt, opposition, determination to be heard walking side by side through London’s streets, their cloaks of flags lifting like wings in the breeze.

I recorded an interview on Better Known Podcast this week (thank you Anna C Wilson 😊) . It’ll be out June 21st if you want to hear me list the six things I wish were better known. Can you take a shot at what they were? No prizes for guessing Greenham, obvs…. And Monday night was the salon at Phoebe's when The Suit made its presence felt in a yellow chair…

I was in Oxford on Tuesday, coffee with S, lunch with P, a quick whizz around the In Bloom exhibition, I can never get enough of black Lillies.

Home in time for class with Kit de Waal, this month on Voice. As Emily Charlotte Powell said of herself, I was completely undone by it, and if you ever get the opportunity to study with Kit just do it. Say yes. I’ve learned so much. She’s a f*****g brilliant teacher. End of.

But I had to jump off 15 mins early, pull myself together ( Andrew Wille you’d have been proud) and zoom in to a book group hosted by shannon kennedy - a roomful of brilliant readers, copies of Fallout in their hands, lives of protest, voice and movement in their hearts and a ready stream of discussion that took us from Nevada, to Greenham, the eighties to the present day, and what would it take to bring 30,000 women together now.

Wednesday was The Obsessive LIVE with Wolf Mom Bridget Young whose son is incarcerated in the US prison system. If you haven’t listened to it yet, let me encourage you to do so. Life turns on a dime, and connection is at the heart of recovery.

Thursday was a quick lunch with A who’s landed on what they love, inadvertently discovering a skill and quick wit for campaign organising - they were up to their ears in the local elections we’ve just had and to hear them talk was to know they’ve hit their stride. I never knew what it was to love what you do. Welcome. It’s a gift. May everyone be as lucky, as awake and as able to grab it with both hands as he has. From there to my mum’s old house yet again to pick up one or two last things before the whole thing closes down and is sold off. A 1950’s Danish serving trolley. A little bedside cupboard. The Stephen Wiltshire prints that hung on her office walls. Do you remember him? As a child I was fascinated by this child genius who could take one look at the Natural History Museum and then recreate it exactly on paper. He sold his first drawing aged eight. Maybe this was it.

And now it’s Friday and yes I’m tired and yes I am ambitious to do more. Fallout continues its rollout and I want more events, more chances, more moments to talk about it and celebrate it and appear at festivals and on panels and in rooms and on podcasts. I look at friends who are on forty event schedules and want it for my own even while my head spins with everything I’ve already done and a, you’ve over done it virus ever nibbles at my toes. This is what it is to love what you do. I want more.

Eleanor

ps, oh yes, forgot to say, most excitingly of all this week, T gave birth to 6 puppies. If you’re very lucky, and I have Margaret’s permission, I’ll post photos. Oh Lord. The pinkness of the noses. The squeak. The scrabble for milk. Heaven.

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Thank you Julie Russell, Craig M. Slater, and many others for tuning into my live video with Louise Fein! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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Who remembers the old Colony rooms in Soho where Francis Bacon fell off bar stools and Lucien Freud gave those eyes? Not me, I’m making that bit up but I imagine. I have read enough about it. It closed and was recreated in a basement room off Regents Street, complete with everything exact, the pictures on the wall, the bar and piano, and that’s where I whipped off too as soon as Jessica Fellowes and I said goodbye on our Obsessive LIVE conversation of Tuesday night - to Wip Flash Open Mic Lit Salon at The Colony Green. I wasn’t going to read. I’d done enough of that lately. My boots were not empty of attention, adrenaline, and risk. I was going to sit at the back while my friends did their thing. But the back turned out to be the front, a low slung room of padded benches against the wall, chairs and those Francis Bacon bar stools, a mic, a piano, a bar and a hat with my name in it and there was no where to hide.

J and H read in turn - what a thrill to see friends be brilliant. The break brought a whiskey at the bar and the barman shy and confessing it was his third time there and yes he did have something but no he really wasn’t ready and J saying, come on and so he did: name in hat along with mine - it was supposed to be random calling but when we sat down first mine came up then his. I remember the heartbeat, the terror of taking words and me on their first public outing ever - an open mic in Betterton Street a hundred years ago - and I watched it crawl all over his body, his lips close to the sound, his hand disbelieving these were really the private lines he’d written that morning being spoke aloud, the room quiet to his touch. This will be a beginning for him and we witnessed it.

There was a French woman, confident and curly in yellow tights and ripped skirt, poetry she had skills for. A long woman in leather sang to tripping guitar. A pot-bellied grey hair got up with doubt and made us all laugh with surprise at his candour and gift. A glasses, dyed blonde performed the play of another’s words that had the beauty of Alan Bennett all over it. Clever. Talk. Talking heads. And on top of all that, the many more who wiped the floor with such high standards in that basement room, came an old friend who at first I didn’t register at all until she said, remember me? and the woman who’d be kneeling on the carpet to my left morphed like magic into B who I’d not seen for thirty years. It was a night.

Like Cinderella I ran for the tube before midnight, J & R with me till Bond Street and Holland Park. Didn’t sleep much. It was like catching a flight and knowing I had to be up early, my brain wouldn’t allow the deep rest of nothing going on the next day. I try to be cool and calm about big adrenaline moments like this, be at the studio for 9:15, call time from 9:30 but my heart knows different. I walked from West London to Portland Place just to calm my nerves. I lay on the floor of the green room. I joked with the producer about pronunciations of my name. When M turned up I gabbled about anything and nothing to get my voice working and lips tuned up and mind on anything but that any minute they were going to push open that glass door and say, we can take you through now and that would be it; no going back.

When it happened it was a relief to let go and let the river take me. Down the carpeted hall, through the heavy sound barrier to the studio, lights, and booths and cans and large red mics with Women’s Hour printed on them so there could be no mistake. Of course my stomach started rumbling, of course my mouth went dry but something else happened, too. She who exists inside me who loves this kind of thing, who turns up reliably and with full relaxed fun took her place instead of me and I found myself smiling at Chloe Tilly across the huge round desk and there we were, getting into conversation as if it was just the two of us, chatting on a park bench. Twelve minutes was over in a flash, and I loved it. If you want to listen on catch up, here’s the link to BBC Sounds. You’ll find me at the 45:21 mark (I’m the last on).

Met D for a spot of lunch yesterday and dinner with R. Another late night, a walk home through lighted streets past the house I lived in when I was a twenty-something me and these past thirty years were all to come. God we had fun there. I feel that lightness of spirit again. The endless possibility. I walk easy.

What happens when two friends publish at the same time? A book swap of course. Join me 6pm today on The Obsessive LIVE with Louise Fein to talk about her latest, Book of Forbidden Words and Fallout….

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe